Although this portrait of Crane’s wife was painted in Rome, the elements of an ‘aesthetic’ setting are there; tiled fireplace, embroidered hanging, black and gold overmantel mirror, Japanese fan and blue-and-white pottery vase add up to a statement of artistic and intellectual inclinations.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Woods went to Venice in 1876 on the recommendation of his lifelong friend, Luke Fildes. Venice was a fashionable place for an artist to work and Woods fell in with a cosmopolitan set, befriending the artists Whistler and Sargent, whose innovative techniques had a powerful influence on his work. This lively sketch, drenched in light, is a good example of his spontaneous process.

By 1895, the year of this painting, Clausen was aware of contradictions between the two French artists he most admired: Bastien-Lepage, whom he thought was ‘consummate’ in ‘rendering facts’, and Millet, intensely spiritual, rendering ‘sentiment’. It was the moody Symbolist landscapes of GF Watts whichprovided a bridge. Clausen wrote (for a lecture on Watts that he gave at the RA in 1905): ‘...landscape does not mean only to peep out of doors... but it should express the infinite spaces of earth and sky.’ Watts’ influence is strong in this moody painting, dark but full of light.

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A blog on my love of Victorian and Edwardian paintings. Please note over 70,000 painters of this period, many very obscure, have been identified and this blog concentrates on those that have come up for auction in the last ten years or so. It is mainly compiled using old auction catalogues with help from the many reference books I own.

It includes painters born in the late 19th century who have painted well into the 20th. I make no pretence that my reproductions are technically accurate but are intended to show the style of the artist.

I rarely know who these paintings were sold to or the price they fetched. I recommend Artnet.com (a subscription service) to those for whom this is important. I am not in the Art trade, just an interested amateur who loves the arts of this period.